Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to Hammer that make performance during mixed operations (reading and writing requests at the same time) much faster. This should work for everyone, though AHCI/SILI/SCSI users will notice it more. The new writing system is called ‘BIOQ‘.
The mpt(4) driver has been updated, thanks to Alexander Polakov. This is useful for anyone using LSI Logic hardware for fibre channel disks, for instance.
Vinum’s been changed to work with devfs, with the advantage that drive labels instead of device paths can now be used. There’s some caveats – read the message for details.
The amount of swap space usable under DragonFly has gone to a theoretical max of 4 terabytes. The practical limit is probably around 512 gigabytes. As Matthew Dillon writes, this could be interesting when paired with SSDs.
There’s some more explanations of how disk serial number support is working from Matthew Dillon, plus a warning that a full kernel/world rebuild is needed because of these changes.
If I’m reading it right, serial number support, combined with a dynamic /dev, makes it possible to identify a disk by serial number, assign a name to it, and then refer to that disk directly by name in places like /etc/fstab. Much, much easier than remembering /dev/ad0c or /dev/ad1a, and so on.
Preliminary serial number support for drive identification has been added to DragonFly, with /dev/serno listing the appropriate devices and numbers.
DevFS has been added. There’s some issues, each with a workaround. Please test, as it’s certain that a major change like this will cause new problems around video and sound. Once those are fixed, however, device management will be a lot easier.
DragonFly has its first 10G network driver, mxge(4), for the Myricom Myri10GE. Aggelos Economopoulos ported it from FreeBSD. Check his post for notes and credits for the people who helped out.
Alexander Polakov has ported the ae(4) network driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; it’s committed now. This device is common in some (many?) Asus Eee devices.
Dennis Melentyev was trying out AHCI support, and as part of that process, Matthew Dillon described the steps needed to deal with disk renaming issues that can come from a NATA -> AHCI switch. This isn’t needed for most people right now, but I wanted to link to it just in case someone hits that moment of panic.
Matthew Dillon fixed a problem with AHCI on July 2nd. If you are running AHCI from before that date with a port multiplier, you may want to update. Further tests have completed without issues.
Sascha Wildner has added an option to the installer to create a UFS boot and Hammer volume as an install disk, in addition to the all-Hammer and all-UFS options already available. Programs expecting the booting kernel to be on UFS will be able to find it, but users still get the benefits of Hammer.
Updated: It replaces the all-Hammer option. Thanks for the correction, Sascha!
I’ve heard of Dvorak keyboard layouts, but I didn’t know there’s another, called Colemak. Sascha Wildner has committed a patch from Geert Hendrickx which makes Colemak layouts available on DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon has changed the way USB flash drives are attached, to make sure they don’t interfere with AHCI-attached disks. This is temporary, and will be replaced by a dynamic /dev.
Matthew Dillon is looking for one more driver to build to complement the AHCI and Sili drivers. There’s several suggestions already.
Taking from his AHCI work, Matthew Dillon’s working on a Silicon Image 3132 driver. An initial version is available now, though the usual caveats about a brand-new device driver apply.
Update: he’s really moving fast on this.
Hasso Tepper posted his notes on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list about the different video modes for the Intel video driver. Version 2.7 works, but only if you use certain options.
If you’re one of the few who has seen a ‘no local apic!’ error when booting, Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit may have a fix for that. He asks for testers, though he cautions to do it without APIC_IO in your kernel config.
Matthew Dillon is relentlessly adding to his AHCI work, with a new status report summing up the speed and stability improvements. The driver will probably end up in the next DragonFly release.
Matthew Dillon has initial support in for port multipliers, along with other AHCI work. It’s not ready for production yet, and he lists the various issues going on, including a need for a different way to mount disks – AHCI changes devicenames from ‘ad’ to ‘da’, which can be a hassle.
Update: hot-swap support, too.
Update update: parallel scans for speed.